STORRS – You may have heard pressure can make footballs do crazy things, some predictable, some not, depending on how you handle them.

Well, the same goes double for college basketball players. Coaches can pump them up or deflate them, depending on what their philosophy might be. But until you put the ball in the kids' hands on a big stage no one really knows how things are going to fly.

The pressure was on Monday at UConn. And yet Geno Auriemma said he would wake up happier Tuesday no matter what happened when top-ranked South Carolina played No. 2 UConn at Gampel Pavilion. Either way, Auriemma believed the result would present teaching points he'd stress in the ever-shortening time between now and March Madness.

What did he learn from the game he dubbed "as the great unknown?" He has another great team, one capable of applying pressure while ignoring it. Again. Final score: UConn 87, South Carolina 62.

Sure, the Huskies may have fallen behind Temple and Cincinnati. They may have struggled to extricate themselves from Memphis. But they hammered the previously unbeaten Gamecocks behind superlative performances from their veterans. Next week, they should be No. 1 again.

No. 2 UConn defeated No. 1 South Carolina, 87-62, on Monday night. The Huskies have now played in No. 1 vs. 2 games 20 times and are 17-3. Of the 20, four were national championship games in which the Huskies are a perfect 4-0. Two were in Final Four semifinals where the Huskies went 1-1. Here's a look back at each of them, including Monday's latest.

"You don't go into any game thinking four of your starters will be on their A game," Auriemma said. "If you get two in a game like this, it's a lot. We got four."

Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis led the Huskies (23-1) with 23 points. She drained five more three-pointers. Breanna Stewart added 22. She had eight rebounds. And Morgan Tuck scored 17 points.

Still it was Moriah Jefferson, with 16 points, six assists and two steals, who brought the blowtorch on this cold and snowy night. With the exhilaration and creativity that has come to define her career, she slipped her tiny body into every seemingly inaccessible crevice South Carolina left open.

And when she emerged with the ball, and she always did, she was impossible to catch or impede. She was marvelous and magical in front of USA Basketball's entire coaching staff, which attended the game. The nation may have found its next point guard.

"It didn't play out exactly as I had hoped," Auriemma said. "I didn't think we'd be able to keep them off the backboard and we didn't. They had 21 offensive rebounds [and outrebounded the Huskies 37-34]. But at the same time, we seemed to get every loose ball and we made a bunch of shots [31-for-56] again.

"But it played out at the pace I wanted. I didn't want this to be a halfcourt game played at 65-60. I was adamant that it wasn't what I wanted."

The Gamecocks (22-1) were led by Tiffany Mitchell and Aleighsa Welch. Both scored 17 points. And coach Dawn Staley was not discouraged.

"This is all a part of the journey we are on to reach some milestones," Staley said. "Each and every time we need to learn a lesson we deal with it. This is no different."

But it was an exciting night for UConn.

"We were hungry, very excited to come out and play," Jefferson said. "It was so much fun to play in an atmosphere like this [a sellout of 10,167]. The students were so loud I could barely hear myself think."

Auriemma knew what was coming in this game between the nation's top two defenders. He understood the magnitude of the event for South Carolina, his newest foe from the Southeastern Conference, a program experiencing its renaissance.

He understood because he lived it exactly the same way 20 years ago when his upstart, undervalued program had its moment, in this very place, against top-ranked Tennessee.

The Huskies did not take South Carolina lightly. For the first eight minutes, the Gamecocks hung tough. After spotting UConn a 3-0 lead with a quick three by Jefferson, South Carolina got busy. The game was tied six times until Tiffany Mitchell's three-point play gave the Gamecocks an 18-15 lead with 12:28 to go in the half.

And then UConn put its machine into drive, beginning with an old-school three-point play by Jefferson that tied the score. Then Tuck, a 58.1 percent shooter who came into the game 7-for-42 from three (16.7), banked a three to give the Huskies a 21-18 lead with 11:51 to play.

Essentially, that was it for South Carolina. Over the last 12:28, the Huskies outscored the Gamecocks 32-13 to carry a 47-31 lead in the half. The Gamecocks scored the first six points of the second half. And then UConn wiped them off their windshield.

"We just wanted to make sure we ran the floor," Mosqueda-Lewis said. "We wanted to use all of our quickness and make sure they didn't get outside on us. We took it to them as much as we could and killed them on the outside [8-for-11 from three] which is what we wanted to do."

On Saturday, in a meaningless game at Memphis, in the midst of mind-numbing conference season, Auriemma picked on three of his best players, limiting Stewart, Tuck and Kiah Stokes to a combined 17 minutes for alleged transgressions in the first 10 minutes of a game UConn won by 56.

Was Auriemma applying the whip? Only he knows. But the added rest and desire to atone for the benching paid off against a big, burly, determined opponent that had won its first 22 games by an average of 28.1 points and had a bench averaging nearly 40.

In the formative first half, Stewart did not leave the floor, despite taking a number of hard falls. She had 11 points and six rebounds. And Tuck played 19 minutes, shooting 5-for-6 (2-for-2 from three) for 12 points. Mosqueda-Lewis also played 20 minutes. She had 12 points, shooting 4-for-5.